Getting a Dell?

Seth is offering one helluva deal on Dell computers. I'm thinking about it myself, as my current Dell is getting a tad long in the tooth. Per Seth, this offer is only good until the 15^th, so you might want to act fast.

Alpacas are following me!

It feels like every time I turn around, I'm seeing or reading about alpacas. First, my favorite author writes a piece where he refers to the gentle member of the camelid family. Next, whenever I'm watching late-night TV (which is when I'm usually watching), I see commercials for AlpacaInfo.com: The Official Website of the Alpaca Owners and Breeders Association. The little alpacas are just so damn cute, gamboling around, that I have to watch the entire thing even though ReplayTV would let me skip it with a click or two. And now, when I'm reading about OSCON, it turns out that Randal Schwartz threw an Alpaca Party (featuring a real live alpaca that you could pet), in honor of the release of the Alpaca book.

The point of all this? Having priced alpacas (no, I'm not going to sell my house), I'm thinking that a simple stuffed animal version would satisfy me. The problem is that when you search Google, about all that comes up is stuffed bears made out of alpaca, which isn't what I want at all! And it seems kind of backwards to get a stuffed alpaca made from alpaca because I can't afford an alpaca. So, if you ever come across a synthetic but darn cute stuffed alpaca, please keep me in mind.

Another kind of lie

The Bush folks are rightly getting raked over the coals for the president's lie in the State of the Union speech. But as Bush's Data Dump shows, the administration doesn't always need to flat-out lie; they can often achieve the same goals by suppressing, manipulating, and withholding economic evidence to serve their policy purposes. As we saw a few weeks ago, this sophisticated form of deception is widespread throughout the Bush regime; the EPA was caught suppressing a study that had the gall to suggest that a rival plan that produces less pollution might be better than the Bush plan that had been vetted by Bush's oil and chemical industry pals. Yet another reason this creep needs to be tossed out of office next year.

Welcome, Deaniacs!

If you've come here by following the link at Blog for America (the official Dean campaign weblog), welcome! While we're Dean supporters, this blog isn't solely about Dean, so take your time and check us out. Thanks for visiting!

O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference update

Remember a few days ago when I wrote, whining about how the O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference 2003 didn't have any women speakers? And how I apologized shortly thereafter, because there was one?

Well, here's the behind the scenes story: while the above was going on, I was writing WTF? emails to the organizers, asking why I hadn't received at least a polite "thanks, but no thanks" email in response to my session proposals. To make a long story short, the answer was that while I thought that I had submitted proposals (hey, I'd sent them stuff via email), they thought that I hadn't (as I hadn't filled out the official web form). No submission = no acceptance (or rejection) letter.

End result: they very nicely and graciously agreed to consider an incredibly late proposal, and it was accepted shortly thereafter. So, there's now an OS X Unwired: Hacking Airport and Bluetooth session at the con. The one bit of bad news: I pitched this as a 3 or 6 hour workshop, but it was accepted as a 45 minute session. It's going to be an experiment in "How fast can Dori talk?," because 45 minutes (which has to include both setup and teardown time) is barely enough to cover the basics.

But it's going to be fun, and from the looks of things, it'll be a great conference.

Sign up by Sept. 12 and take advantage of the early bird discount!

And while I'm plugging one upcoming gig, I should also mention:

• July 16: I'll be in NYC, speaking at the User Group Lounge at Macworld Creative Pro. Come and watch what I'm like when I haven't slept for 48 hours!
• July 17: My official reason for going to NYC: Making Your Sites Work with Today's Browsers. Yep, it'll be me channelling Jeffrey Zeldman, with a whole lot of JavaScript thrown in.
• August 19: Tom talks about Keynote for the North Coast Mac Users Group (our local MUG). No, Tom hasn't gotten MUGs out of his system yet.
• September 20: Both of us speak at NCMUG's annual Mac Computer Expo. Okay, neither of us has completely gotten MUGs out of our systems. But MCE's a lot of fun, and the list of speakers (Jim Heid, Bert Monroy, Derrick Story, etc.) is great even if you don't count us.

See you there, we hope!

War on Criticism

Once again, The Onion comes through: Bush Asks Congress For $30 Billion To Help Fight War On Criticism.